Manuscript Editing for Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice Articles

Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice serves law enforcement leaders, police researchers, analysts, and policy makers. It publishes peer-reviewed analysis and commentary on police reform, training, patrol and investigations, accountability, and human and civil rights. Articles draw on international examples of good practice and test how research applies to strategy and operations. Oxford University Press publishes it, with general editors at the Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge and Arizona State University.

Full articles typically run 4,000 to 6,000 words and stay within 6,000, with endnotes and references outside the count. Shorter articles, debate pieces, and responses also appear. Each paper carries an abstract of 150 words at most, with no references in it. References follow Harvard style, author-date in the text, with journal names in full and numbered endnotes at the end. Case law goes in footnotes with a full citation. Review is double-anonymized, usually by two reviewers. Every figure needs alt text under its caption, and house style uses single quotation marks and spells out numbers one to ten. Submissions go through ScholarOne Manuscripts.

Oxford's author guidelines cover article length, Harvard references, and house style. If you have reviewer comments from an earlier submission, send them with your manuscript and we will address each one. If you have questions about which service is right for your manuscript, contact us directly. We respond to every inquiry the same day during business hours.

Our legal editing services cover criminology and policing research, where social science references and legal citations meet in the same paper. Academic proofreading covers the final read. If English is your second language, see English language editing for researchers. We also prepare articles for Policing and Society and Police Quarterly.